Twitter made me, but X might break me.

Twitter made me, but X might break me. Those are the rules of neoliberalism because wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of the few.

My father and I began our Twitter journey in October 2010. For the first few years, the platform was a unique space where those with no voice could attract huge numbers of followers and be heard by thousands.

Without it, my dad's reach as the World's Oldest Rebel would not have been as wide. The same goes for thousands of others, who because they tweeted interesting observations built followings.

At the time of my dad's death our twitter account had over 250k followers and as of today it stands at 145k. My engagement reach since Musk took over Twitter is as successful as trying to light a fire in a rainstorm. Followers disengage, drop off and disappear in their hundreds, sometimes thousands.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Most days my posts sit as listless as a clipper ship stuck in the doldrums. It's disheartening to watch the gates close on accessible free expression. It's enraging that voices like mine or yours and many other worthy advocates for a better society are silenced by shadow bans. We have been replaced by well-paid fascists and neoliberals, who suck all of social media's democratic oxygen out of the room to fight over society's pocketbook rather than its soul.

Capitalism produces nothing but profit and waste. We should have known better at the start of Twitter to ever believe it would be an agora of ideas, an Algonquin Round Table for thoughtful people not connected to power.

Twitter was a bear cub playfully learning to grow into a dangerous capitalistic carnivore. The content all of us created for Twitter during those early years was meat to sustain it. It needed time to understand how to monetise itself for the benefit of its wealthy owners. Capitalism isn't a meritocracy. It is eat or be eaten.

Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X because he is a megalomaniac. He's also a savvy dictator in waiting. He saw the potential to enhance his wealth and power by purchasing the world's soap box to turn it into the world's "Munich Beer Hall, Putsch" where anyone gets to be Hitler for a minute.

He is not alone in his pursuit of autocracy amongst the very rich. The internet is controlled by Billionaire behemoths who will never have democracy, society or simple common decency in their life plans.

We've lived in a dystopia for so long now; we pretend that in the before times, the “good old days” existed on social media. But that is much like a mouse lamenting it was once easier to steal cheese from a trap because the mechanism’s lethal spring wasn’t as efficient.

Musk is a disrupter because it suits his robber baron style. He is a chaos maker like Trump, All billionaires are fascists- some wear it more on their sleeve than others. You can't be that rich and not be corrupted or not feel; you are more important to "civilisation" than the teeming masses below. Musk is just a billionaire saying the quiet parts out loud.

It's our curse to live in a time where endless possibility is matched by infinite stupidity, greed and narcissism. Neoliberalism did this to us. It poisoned everything and reduced humanity to ledger items in the account books of the 1%. We are nothing more than a number which represents profits or loss. Their is a cruel indifference to the lives of ordinary people during this era which is reminiscent of France or Russia before their cataclysmic revolutions.

The Covid Pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, the Second election of Trump as President, and the genocide against Palestinians don't portend well for either the short or long term future of the West. I get a sense our civilisation is ending, and the credits of destruction are rolling over it as if it was the last few frames in a movie.

If I had wealth, I’d probably flee social media and spend the rest of my days living off the grid in a cabin in the woods. I’d read from physical books with spines that cracked when newly opened. I’d listen to albums by Bach, Thelonious Monk, New Order and PJ Harvey powered by solar panels. But I am not rich and don't have the luxury to say "I am out of here, you bunch of fascist bastards."

Social media is how I must define myself and attempt to preserve what I toiled on with my dad.

Those five books, my memoir, my book about Portugal, the essays, my brother's working-class art, the speeches, the podcasts, the trips to refugee camps, and the over 200k tweets must be preserved. They are part of a working-class cannon of literature that dared to be heard, counted and remembered.

 It is better to have Musk extinguish the light that glows from my tweets rather than surrender to the despair fascism wants us to accept as our lot in life.

I am not going to live to see the end of this autocracy run by the 1%. But I want at least to believe I died trying to fight it, if only through words and some actions that keep me on the right side of human compassion.

Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co-morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. So you can join with a paid subscription, which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription or just help out with a tip. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it's all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take care, John